Re: [boost] Maintenance suspended

Subject: Re: [boost] Maintenance suspended
From: Christophe Henry (christophe.j.henry_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-07-08 08:28:25

David Abrahams wrote:
> All ---
>
>> I tried, I really did, to resolve the trunk and release branches of my libraries for the upcoming release.
>But the truth is that I'm finding Boost's current interdependent structure and the sluggishness of SVN on
>a project of our size just makes everything too hard to do.  I'm now just declaring openly what has
>effectively been true for the past couple of months: I'm not maintaining my libraries until I complete the
>transition to Git that goes along with using Ryppln (http://ryppl.org).  I'm sorry, I know it's not good or
>right, but I know it's going to be for the best in the long run.  That should all happen fairly quickly now, anyway.
>
> --
> David Abrahams
> BoostPro Computing
> http://boostpro.com
>

Dave,

having a single library to maintain I probably cannot fully appreciate
your situation.
However, I would like to attract your attention to the very special
position you have in this community, especially among newcomers I
count myself with. Seeing dave (I mean THE dave! ;-) ) not maintaining
his libraries creates a precedent and sends a wrong signal, which
deals a blow to boost's credibility. Companies could wonder, waow, if
the community cannot even help dave maintain his libraries, in which
state must be others?

Also considering that ryppl is so far not a reality yet and not even
agreed on, we need a solution for the time being.
Why not simply request help from the community to which you brought so
much? I'm sure that many would be happy to help you on this.

So, concretely, what is the problem? Do you have no time handling the
feature requests or is svn the problem?
If it is just about merging and doing some mechanical svn-related
tasks, this is a very workable solution and I gladly offer my help.
If it is about feature requests, this is a more complicated one (but
seemingly unrelated to svn) and you could also ask for support on this
list. Surely, someone competent will step forward and free you from
much work. You could simply review patches before commit. It would
also help the community by having more than one person familiar with
your libraries.

Christophe

PS:
Thinking about it more, it would be a good idea if every boost author
would mentor one or several "young" members who could take over when
the author's situation changes. In any company, we usually try to
avoid having only one person knowing a subject.
Maybe a boostcon would be a good place where authors would explain the
inside of their library?